As more and more content comes over the internet, rather than through traditional transmitters, opportunities emerge. Julian Clover spoke to Net Insight’s Per Lindgren.
Fibre is increasingly being used for point-to-point signal delivery. Whereas once the team coach would have been preceded by a satellite truck, now many of Europe’s top sporting grounds are already plumbed in.
But there is more that can be done between telco and broadcaster: “There are between five and six business opportunities for the service providers from the content providers,” Per Lindgren, VP business development, Net Insight tells me.
Two relate to the business to business capabilities, if you have a business to business network you can also bring contribution feeds into those studios, as well as providing cloud services for the content providers including encoding and transcoding services. So rather than buy them in, these types of services can be sub-contracted.
There is a growing need for more bandwidth from the broadcasters, who are either multiplying their linear channels, or using the internet to distribute alternate events.
Lindgren says that once a contribution network has been built this can also be leveraged for the playout of over-the-top services. “If you are a service provider you can both host the playout as well as the caching infrastructure for the content providers.” The deals however are more likely to be kept separate, rather than bolting them together in some sort of high-end triple play, both models are possible.
A number of telcos, such as AT&T and Vodafone, are beginning to offer hosting services for over-the-top delivery as a means to get into the value chain by offering both the playout and the caching services to the content providers. Lindgren points to the next logical stage being the provision of a CDN, where traditional players like Level 3, Akamai and Limelight have traditionally replicating the content closer to the end user.
“With the content moving away from clips towards longer pieces or even movies of one to two hours, people are going more local. The question is what the business model will look like? Will it be the content providers that pay the service providers for a premium service? That is tied to network neutrality, so you can’t really prioritise ITV over somebody else”.
The way round that is instead of prioritising on the broadband service you provide the CDN service to the content providers for them to bring their content out to the caches, or the last mile, so becoming more like a premium VPN.
Everything is treated equally from the last mile, but the quality is much improved before it gets there.
